But, after applying to programs, I wasn’t feeling it. You studied Music Composition as an undergrad? For the first year I was applying to music composition grad programs, but then I began applying to MFA programs. Then I had about a four-year period in which I was working, applying to grad schools, and writing. I began working on a number of the poems during my undergrad. Did you sit on it for a number of years? How did that publication process happen? On that cheery note-you say you wrote Safe Space late in your undergrad and early in your MFA, right? I feel like since November 9th I’ve been aging in dog years or something. That wasn’t really that long ago when you think about it. I know that was a thing you were nervous about back during the Dodge Festival. Yeah, I hope that you can figure that out, too. I’m applying to a lot, hopefully I’ll get something soon. I haven’t really been doing a lot besides looking for work. right now?Īre you feeling full of energy right now or are you feeling drained? I don’t know what your day was like. No, it’s good! I think that we’re good for each other in that way.Īnd you level me out. Well, I was very understated and it sort of deflated your exuberance. And I was all excited to deliver an exuberant “Hello, Jos!” Usually, even when someone knows who's going to be on the other end, it's still a “Hello?” It’s a faux interrogative. One can’t take a photo of the entire city and render every person’s story within the city intelligible by this one ultimate photo of everything. The challenge is to render the image in a way that’s immediate and carries that weight without betraying it in language. It was incessant and I couldn’t turn away, which is like trauma, specifically sexual trauma, one keeps, or is forced to keep, returning.

The ‘I’ is just this rough and vague center in my sights.

It’s sincere, but it’s also very clear about its self-awareness, its distance, its playfulness.

It brings this history of juvenilia into poetry-something often dismissed as childish, cute, not ‘worth’ anything-and tries to take it seriously. Safe Space Buy John Donne was my first real poetic love. Jos Charles received an MFA from the University of Arizona. In 2016 they received a Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship through the Poetry Foundation. Their poetry has been published with Poetry, PEN, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, The Feminist Wire, GLAAD, LAMBDA Literary, and elsewhere. They are founding-editor of THEM, a trans literary journal. Their debut poetry collection, Safe Space, is available from Ahsahta Press (2016).

Feeld by jos charles